


Lazarus

by YesVirginia



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Biblestuck, Body Horror, Gen, M/M, Terminal Illnesses, Undead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-02
Updated: 2013-02-02
Packaged: 2017-11-27 21:16:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/666588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YesVirginia/pseuds/YesVirginia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Psiioniic has never believed in miracles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lazarus

He wakes up, heart racing in his chest and his mind alight. There are blurry images, remembered from his dream, there are colours and cold and the sensation of something heavy on his chest, pressing down until his lungs can’t hold the strain. There is the hazy memory of his own breath, fast with fear at first and then suddenly slow and tight and impossible, and then still.

The Psiioniic has foreseen his own death. 

It doesn’t make sense at first, visions rarely do. There’s only a dull sensation of fear, vague images that mean nothing. He doesn’t tell his companions a word. There is no real sense of time, but with every passing day the sensation grows — soon. Doom is foretelling itself, signs for those who may see. He is afraid, for the others, but for himself as well. Wearing his own death like a cloak his whole life still hasn’t prepared him for the reality of it, the charged feeling of an oncoming storm in the air.

He becomes jumpier than before, a mess of hunched shoulders and sharp bones and tangled sinews, and he sparks like a stormcloud. He can feel the surety leave his hands, fog in his thoughts as if life has already started to leave him. But still he doesn’t tell, he keeps quiet, and the only thing he gets out through pointed gnashing teeth, his head in the lap of his companion, is “I’m afraid.”

The Signless does not ask of what he is afraid. He strokes the static-charged snarls of his hair and soothes him with his touch and with his voice and most of all with his presence, red as the sun but far kinder. He tells him that fear is understandable, valid, that he believes in his fear but would like him to have faith as well. And though he knows his own death, and feels its breath at the back of his neck, he believes in the Signless, he couldn’t not. There is something to his moirail that moves things, that moves thoughts in the minds of people, and he lets himself be comforted, the harsh whisper of it’s-soon-you’re-next quieted in his mind. He only thinks, his mind fumbling over the concepts, that he does not want to leave this man, doesn’t want to stop carrying his cause. The thought is almost petulant.

The cold and the heaviness still don’t add up to anything. He’s always believed that he would die in a fight, his own mind rending his head apart when the stress of power became too much for his body to bear. So when they separate — he’s scared, and more so because he’s being left alone, but they have to scatter to stay safe, he sees the reason of that — he only knows that something is coming, but not what.

He isn’t entirely alone, though he feels that way, small and scared. The Disciple has stayed with him when their group splintered for the sake of temporary safety, and she is the first to notice something, notice that his skin is growing unhealthy and his eyes dull. And on the evening after she first voices her concerns, he wakes up to a scene from his dream, something heavy compressing his chest and forcing the breath out of him. It leaves before it can suffocate him, but now he knows.

There is something wrong with his lungs. Something sticks inside of them, growing, making them weak and making every breath a battle. He starts feeling cold continuously, and he becomes unaware of his surroundings, cannot focus, because all his focus is on forcing his lungs to take in more air that never feels like enough.   
The Disciple stays with him, brings food to him that she herself has caught, rumbles old, soothing songs to him in her lioness’s voice. But her eyes grow sadder gradually, he can see that, in the same span that his body weakens.

There isn’t energy left in him to move nor to pick up anything, and there isn’t any to act on the fear he feels. It keeps him pressed to the bed, illness and fear together until he can’t move a muscle, until he’s cold and paralyzed and feels as if he’s dead already.   
And then one evening he opens his eyes and doom is looking back at him, perfectly clear, and he isn’t as scared as he thought to be.  
His eyes stop casting their own glow, until they are almost black. His arms are like lead weights at his sides. He doesn’t feel scared. The only thing he feels is cold, and cold it stays when his breath betrays him, but once it stops completely, even the cold leaves, and he knows nothing.

And the next thing he knows is the voice of the Signless, saying “Wake up.”

He hears it indistinctly, as if his ears are plugged with something, but he knows that voice better than his own, and now it is raised as if to hold a sermon. That he is awake, he knows, but it’s dark, and he can’t tell if it’s dark because there is no light where he is, or because his eyelids won’t open when he tries to blink. Everything is slow, unresponsive, heavy. And with a sudden clarity that shocks him, he remembers that he’s supposed to be dead. And his body, heavy in every bone and muscle, remembers it as well. He breathes in, carefully as if not to unsettle something, realizes that he wasn’t breathing before that moment, and smells death in the air, the weight of it settled in his lungs. His blood has sunk in his body. The smell of the grave, of himself in it, becomes overwhelming, and by rights he should not be able to think a thing, but he succumbs to quiet hysteria anyways. He’s dead, skin sticky with something used to embalm him, a shroud pulled tight around his limbs and over his face.

“Psiioniic, wake up and come out!”

The voice again, the same voice that has roused him from the depth of depression and made him give a sign of life, but now, but now, there’s nothing to raise from, how can he shake his heavy congested blood, his decomposing muscles, his blinded eyes, the stench of death underneath the smell of embalming oils?  
But that voice will not let him sleep, and it will not let him sink back into death, he knows that. This is a voice that stirs the blood, as it has always done, and it stirs the blood that has gone black in the Psiioniic’s veins, and he feels a thready pulse in his throat that doesn’t match at all the coldness of death in the rest of him. His limbs are still freezing, stiff and swollen and clumsy, but he manages to turn his hands by degrees until his nails scrape up against the shroud that pins him, and starts to claw his way out, in blind terror that his fingernails will loosen and pull from their beds. The cloth gives way slowly, tearing. After an eternity of scrabbling at the shroud, listening for nothing but the voice of his moirail to pull him back from the void, his arms are free. They fall to his sides, heavy and unmoving.

Forcing himself to sit up is an agonizing process. He ignores all the signals that tell him he should lie back down and get on with decomposition, he ignores natural order. There is nothing natural about it when he forces his stiff arms to support himself and feels gathered blood in his back weigh him down. His lungs rattle with every breath, thick and sticky, and he still cannot see a thing, from the cloth over his face or from the state of his eyes he doesn’t know. He touches a hand to his skin, tentatively, and lets out a noise of despair at how soft and wrong his skin feels, like something gone bad. Now that he’s moved, and now that he’s breathing a little deeper, the smell is even worse. When his feet hit the floor, numb and swollen, he has almost managed to convince himself that this is yet another dream.

“Wake up and come out!”

He is awake, and now he comes, dragging his feet, clumsily holding on to the walls and nearly banging into them, and the first thing he sees is a blotch of light through the cloth over his face. He is back, he thinks wonderingly as he stumbles out of the mouth of the cave, he is back under the open sky, but in what state? Finally, with fingers that feel just a little warmed, a little more mobile, he claws the cloth from his face. Leaves scratches. The blood that runs down from the small scrapes is yellow, common as dirt, but it is clean and normal and healthy-looking, and the Psiioniic almost breaks down with relief. He looks at his companions, and they stare back, wonder and shock and happiness. The Disciple is crying and smiling at the same time. She barrels into him and nearly bowls him over, strong arms around his waist, and he freezes with shock. She’ll be able to smell the grave on him, she’ll pull away with disgust, this has all been a mistake. But she does no such thing. He shudders, breathes in, and smells only dirt and stale air and resin, and his flesh is clean, and his lungs are strong.

For the first few days after he has woken up again, he is terrified that the change will not hold, that he’ll wake up to heavy limbs and thick blood and his body breaking down. The Signless keeps his head in his lap and strokes his hair, and reassures him that he has gotten him back, for good, for keeps, and even the voices in his head and in his dreams agree. So he presses his face into his moirails cloak, accepts the soothing kisses that tell him that his heart is still beating, his skin is whole and healthy and flush with blood, and he smells like nothing but sandalwood and ozone. The grave has left him, and the warmth of his moirail’s skin banishes the cold from his bones. The Psiioniic has never believed in miracles, but he has always believed in the Signless.

**Author's Note:**

> Please suspend the fact that trolls don't bury their dead for the sake of the plot, take it as an odd sort of Bible crossover if you will.


End file.
